“Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.”  – Martin Luther King

Like almost everyone reading this, I am struggling and working hard to learn how to grapple with the wave of hatred, rage, and madness sweeping some parts of the country some of the time.

I’m happy to share what I am learning, and I hope it helps; I can almost physically feel the hate and sadness.

Hate and anger are not the whole stories; they never are. I intend to make some of my news.

I don’t hate Donald Trump and the movement he unleashed and encouraged. He stands for something significant, and millions of people hear and like his message.

We are a democracy, and the people get to decide. They will get what they deserve.

Although I am often accused of hating Mr. Trump, I don’t, he is not that important in my life, and I know hatred has never accomplished anything meaningful or lasting. Fortunately, hatred is one of those things I just never learned.

A novelist I can’t remember had a character in her book tell someone: “I don’t hate you. I don’t like that  you exist.” That sums up Trumpism for me. More than anything else, he makes me sad.

For me, he does not foreshadow the end of the world, victorious or not.

We humans are not built to hate and hate and hate. Sooner or later, hatred wears us down and is inevitably replaced by something better. When something stronger than hatred presents itself, the haters will melt away. Every great faith and leader in our history has preached love and mercy.

Those values are not gone, they are just hiding in the bushes, waiting for their time.

That is not my observation, it is the history of our country, which has always contained venomous,  angry – and sometimes bigoted – people and conflicts. We have never been a gentle and merciful country.

But we have always managed to keep Kings and dictators at bay.

I don’t know if Donald Trump is running for President or winning. I care much less than I once did. I know my life and your life will go on, and I love my life and am grateful for it. No lying or immoral politician will take it from me.

I suppose getting older is a factor; this is not my battle to fight in so many ways. I am committed to using the few years ahead of me for a good purpose. I won’t waste a minute of them.

To me, Trump is like a toxic wind-up doll that spouts poison and lies. He is the Bugaboo of people who call themselves liberal or progressive, dirty words in many places. Bugaboos can be terrible, or they can be productive, spouting all kinds of movements and responses.

Mr. Trump seems to I’ve without kindness or compassion. He makes people sick, not just in protest but in worship. He is heading for 80 years of age and remains the most detested politician in American history as well as one who is loved by millions.

Scholars will be researching him for decades. But I don’t believe for a second that he will be going back to the White House.

I am careful, as a former journalist, not to put so much weight on the haters and screamers who are challenging every level of American politics and civility. Beating up nurses and airline stewards? Threatening to kill nurses who try and do their work? It doesn’t feel American to me.

Journalism loves fire and murder and haters much more than they love the good and honest and hard-working people who form the center of American life.

If you only followed the so-called mainstream media, you would not know that these kinds of a kind and decent people even exist, let alone grasp the good they do. If you are associated with the Army Of Good, you deal with them and see them every day.

I know they exist. They spawn hope wherever they go.

Sue Silverstein, the theology and art teacher at Bishop Maginn High School, is my teacher when it comes to giving thanks for what I have and caring for those that are weaker than me.

She does good every day and bolsters, even saves,  lives. That is sacred work. Politics right now is not.

There are an awful lot of good and honest people out there and they are not storming school board meetings or shouting death threats to local politicians and congresspeople and nurses and health care workers or attacking Big Bird of  Sesame Street, as Senator Ted Cruz did last week because theBird urged children to get vaccinated?

(At least the senator was defending Dr. Seuss a few months ago. Let the people starve, we know what’s important.)

Could anyone have imagined us being here in 2021? I feel I must have a grounding way to deal with it. I think I have. I want to keep my humanity intact, and not be drawn into the foul well. I have to confess this brings back memories of the Scopes Monkey Trial when devout “Christians” tried to jail a school teacher for teaching the Theory of Evolution.

It has happened before. But freedom can be loud and determined too. Wait and see.

Like Mr. Trump, ambitious Republicans don’t seem to know where to stop.  They’ve gone over the top, a familiar graveyard for politicians all the way back to the American Revolution. The irony of our political parties is that each one has a penchant for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

What a chance Mr. Trump has right now, as Biden sinks deeper and deeper in the polls.

He could actually be proposing solutions for our economic troubles, plans for fighting inflation,  pushing positive ideas for beating Covid-19, relief for the millions of Americans struggling with climate change.

He is doing none of that,  he is not interested in policies or programs. Hee’s seeking vengeance for anyone who dared speak freely in the world’s once greatest democracy and fund-raising for his many legal struggles. Our world is upset down. People – even in Congress –  wink the murderous assault on our capital and blow kisses to the killers and traitors.

Perhaps there are vile mind-altering potions that come with Covid-19 and spread through the air. That is a conspiracy theory I could get behind.

Once again, you may depend on Donald Trump to self-destruct. Remember Tulsa. Remember the Bleach. That is the curse of the bad boy, they often forget t be good when they need to be.

This see-sawing will go on for a good while.

I will simply have to live with it, I’m resigned to that.

I sure won’t spend the rest of my life in fear and anger.

I won’t give myself to them, permit them to drain my spirits, or permit them to let me pull myself so low as to hate them. It will not be easy, but I promised myself I would do my good until I can’t do good anymore.

John Steinback was a powerful writer but also a good human. Try to understand men, he pleaded. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to bad and almost always leads to love.

I intend to try out that theory.

However you cut it, Donald Trump and his followers are not the future of America, even if he does live a few more years. The ass-kissing clowns he surrounds himself with are not as good as he is at peddling lies and winning converts. You, sir, are no Trump!

When Rudolf Guiliani and Mister Pillow are your most trusted and loyal advisers, you’re not going anywhere far. All of his other loyal advisers are either in prison or fighting to stay out of one.

Trump has a genius for lying with such conviction and shamelessness it is difficult to doubt him. We aren’t used to people who lie in the same way they breathe.

Half of our troubled country believes everything he says.

The tragedy for Donald Trump in a political sense is that his insistence on lying about the 2020 election is not his rebirth or salvation. It is not his path to glory. It will be his undoing.

Joe Biden’s polls are plunging, but Donald Trump’s polls are not rising. This would be the time.

If Trump let go of his election lying, and his undermining of democracy, some of his interesting and conventional (and intriguing) ideas might actually draw new voters to his campaign and his movement.

Perhaps the media might focus on his policies rather than his lies and psychotic obsession with ego,  dishonesty, and self-aggrandizement. That did him in before, and it will do him in again.

You really can’t lie your way to the top and stay there if you have nothing else to offer.

My work with the Mansion and the refugees in Albany sustains me and lifts me up. It is impossible to know these wonderful people at the edge of life or these brave and determined young children and feel anger and despair.

They are the powerful and lasting antidotes for me, more powerful than any pill. They are the future.

The human spirit is good and full of compassion, that is our nature, and it will prevail sooner or later. It is stronger than anything, it has been from the beginning of time.

The next few years will be difficult, they will, in fact, try out souls.

But I see them in the same way that I see an awful February storm.

The power might go out, it might snow for days, the roof may leak,  and the animals might get cold, but the skies will clear and the sun will return and life, which is much stronger than anyone man or movement.  And life will go on. If there is a God, he was wise in putting Spring after winter, and the dark days before the light.

If you want something to fear, forget about Trump and think about Mother Earth. She’s worth it. And she is bleeding.

I believe in love and good and truth and faith, I strongly believe they are the most powerful forces in the world, and if we hang onto our faith in them, they will prevail.

I’m no magician, but I do know this:

I see this kind of hate as a volcanic eruption. It won’t last forever,  any more than a cold fever never goes away, or a storm never ends. And one day, it will erupt again. That is our story.

Somehow, and the reasons are not yet clear, this is something we needed to go through as a nation and have gone through a number of times before. This fury could damage or system or cleanse it, it’s too soon to know.

But we live in a powerful new reality: women and African Americans and black and yellow people and gay and trans people have formed powerful new movements and come out into the open and said, each in their own way: enough of angry and often hateful white men telling them what to do and trying, without mandate or representation, to run their lives and steal their votes.

You don’t need to be a sociologist to see who the overwhelming color was of the people who were storming the Capitol on January 6 and ramming poles and flags into the mouths and eyes of police officers.

Remember that this isn’t the 1800’s. It’s too late for the bigots and White Nationalists who hide behind our flag and soil its meaning.  Change is not just coming, it is here.

If you love your history, as I do, you know that nothing that is happening now hasn’t happened before.

The Civil War took more than a half-million American lives, and I do not see that in our future, however ugly and disturbing things get.

So I’m staying in my life. I won’t engage the haters, and I won’t argue with them. That engagement is their only true power. Without it, they are soulless and are in denial of reality or truth.

I’ve learned something important from my Amish friends.

When a sick man broke into one of their schools and slaughtered five girls 10 years ago, they forgave him and gave the money that was donated to them to his family and to the police officers who rushed to their rescue.

Mr. Trump will learn soon enough that vengeance is the Lord’s business, not his. And the man many believe was God’s son, we are told,  pleaded for forgiveness: The Lord, he said, was forgiving and good. “And when also you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you...”

I was taught to be compassionate to the sick and that must apply to the haters punching airline stewards, they are without question sick. Hatred is their fuel. Forgiveness is their undoing.

In our country, we never seem to want to treat the sick, we just want to throw them in jail.

Perhaps we can do better this time.